My wife and I have enjoyed the wonders of growing plants, both edible and ornamental, for many years. One of the early revelations we received in this pursuit concerned the power of the compost pile.
At the time, we attended several classes in gardening, and one specifically addressed organic gardening. The single most important thing they communicated to us in that series of classes was the amazing effect of biological degradation. Biological entities and processes conspire to take old and no longer useful organic materials and transform them into something new and highly useful. This is the complex process that is composting.
A compost pile is a beautiful thing. Wait– how can garbage be beautiful? As the cliche goes, "One man's rubbish is another man's treasure,” and it proves literally true in this case.
To form a compost pile, you need a large collection of stuff totally without merit in its current condition. This could be garbage from the kitchen, dead leaves from last autumn's leaf drop, lawn clippings, weeds pulled from the garden, shredded paper from the mountains of junk mail you receive, and even more surprising things. And the greater the diversity of starting materials you procure, the richer and more useful the final product.
Water and oxygen comprise the other two required elements. While the materials used to build the pile are important, the pile also requires a moist environment and plenty of fresh air and ventilation, since the compost pile is a living, breathing, complex community of micro-organisms. When operating correctly and efficiently, the vibrant life of billions (maybe trillions) of molds, fungi, bacteria, and phages fill the compost pile. During its later stages, it might be inhabited and worked by earthworms, beetles, and pill bugs.
This community exists, on the one hand, for the purpose of propagating itself. Life is intent on producing progeny– on making more of itself. This amazing and powerful force continues at work on this earth. On the other hand, and from a larger perspective, this community exists for the production of raw materials for other communities of life– the garden, in this case. This community, this compost heap, is like a food and energy factory for other plants. It takes rubbish coming in one door, manufactures nutritious products out of it, and then ships that out the other door.
The assembly of a compost pile is straight forward– pile up layers (three to six inches deep) of the starting materials (the more diverse the materials the better) and occasionally sprinkle the growing pile with water from a hose or watering can. Plenty of high-nitrogen organic material should be included in the mix since this supplies most of the energy for the process. A source of nitrogen is like fertilizer for the pile and can be in the form of green plant material (like pulled weeds, grass clippings, or tree prunings), or animal waste (manure or urine).
This last item mentioned (urine) recalls an amusing anecdote. The man who taught our organic gardening class mentioned that his favorite way of adding nitrogen to his compost was by taking a late-night stroll to his working compost pile and urinating on the pile. He said that the urea in urine is a nearly perfect compound for adding the available nitrogen that is needed by bacteria in the pile.
Several students in the class were aghast at this suggestion, but our instructor attempted to calm their fears by commenting that unless you have some obvious urinary tract infection, urine is actually a very sterile liquid and perfectly acceptable to add to the pile. He said that if you just can't bring yourself to add urine to the pile, a "cleaner" or more "proper" way of adding the same chemical is to buy a couple of pounds of pure urea from your local garden center and then add a few tablespoons of the stuff, scattering it through the pile. But he still preferred the more "natural" way of energizing his pile. I have done the same over the years with my own compost piles and have to agree.
Distributing a few handfuls of common topsoil throughout the pile efficiently adds a good stock of living (though somewhat dormant) organisms– both fungal and bacterial. Although a good stock of micro-organisms resides on the outside of most plant materials, you cannot beat real dirt for a diverse and comprehensive menagerie of all sorts of tiny living things. Your Mama slapped your little baby-hands and told you to not eat that stuff (dirt) for good reason.
Finally, of great importance when building the pile is to avoid compressing all of the organic material when stacking it up, layer upon layer. Oxygen from the atmosphere is critical to the living processes at work. Although it is possible to produce compost anaerobically (without air), you won't really like the result, for it smells like the most offensive sewage imaginable. Don't go there. Instead of these offensive (to us) anaerobic microbes, we want to encourage the aerobic ones. These fungi, bacteria, and other microbes thrive on the use of oxygen in doing their work.
To allow a liberal flow of air (and its attendant oxygen) into the pile, "fluff up" the plant materials so you build a highly porous, spongy matrix. This allows a considerable amount of ventilation and convection to occur, and draws in much oxygen as the process continues. To further assist this ventilation build the entire pile over a six-inch layer of small, dead branches, twigs, and other woody material, laid directly on the ground. And for a highly engineered and supremely ventilated pile, incorporate pieces of perforated plastic drain pipe into the pile.
The activity at work in a compost pile, if not technically miraculous, is at least astounding. The combined and concerted labors of fungi and bacteria is a wonder to behold, and totally unexpected by the novice composter. After first building the pile, little or no obvious activity will appear for the first day or two. At this stage, the organisms that have been incorporated into the pile have only begun to wake up through rehydration and the absorption of vital metabolic nutrients. Then, they begin to ramp up their level of metabolism and energy production. Finally, they scale up the entire operation through extensive reproduction of their kinds.
As the compost cycle proceeds it is important for the compost builder to regularly "turn" or mix the pile– probably every two or three days if the pile is working well. This turning and mixing action serves to spread the active microbes into all portions of the pile, and also brings some of the pile which has not yet started breaking down into the center, most active region of the pile.
As the activity and production builds, the microbes not only consume and transform the plant material in the nascent compost, but they produce energy as well. This excess energy is detectible as an increasing temperature in the pile. This aspect of compost production is probably the most dramatic one for the initiate. When breaking into a compost heap with a garden fork at about the one week stage, the compost will be at about its peak activity and the energy production will be at its most obvious.
When the fork enters the pile, opens it up, and exposes the heart of the compost heap, clouds of steam rise out of it (it can be very hot, so don't stick your hand in it!) and you will smell the strong aroma of a cooking organic "soup." This is a rich, heady experience, not to be missed. Very unlike the expected putrid smell of rotting vegetation, this, instead, exudes a deep, rich, earthy fragrance, full of the promise of fertility and prosperity. Once smelled and enjoyed, it will not soon be forgotten. Much like entering the rich, moist environment of a well-tended, working green house, this exhales the aroma of life.
After opening the pile for turning, other aspects of this living transformation make themselves obvious. Tiny, microscopically thin, white threads may permeate the vegetable matter. These are mycelium– the threadlike cells that compose the spreading bodies of various fungi, growing on the nutrients. Eventually, some of these fungi may mature enough to produce fruiting bodies that rise beyond the outer surface of the pile– we know these as mushrooms.
Different regions of material in the compost contain various new colors that weren't present before in the pile: white, gray, black– even blues, greens, yellows, and oranges– all evidence of the unseen work of microscopic bacteria and fungi.
The most important part of the transformation is demonstrated in the changing texture and conformation of the material. At the first few turnings, what started out as leaves, banana peels, eggshells, and shredded paper is still obvious. But as the process proceeds, the individual particles and pieces making up the mass become smaller and smaller, less and less the original colors, and finally transforming into unrecognizable form. The leaves, clippings, and kitchen waste materials break down first. Eggshells and hard woody sticks are the last holdouts to change their identities, but given enough moisture, heat, and time, even they follow suit.
What began as a large heap of garbage and waste has transmuted into a rich, homogeneous organic (living) growing-medium. The stuff smells, feels, and looks like the richest topsoil or most expensive potting soil known. One of the most remarkable experiences I have personally witnessed was taking a thirty gallon garbage can full of fresh horse manure from a friend's stables, combining it with other miscellaneous garbage and things I wouldn't even dream of touching with my bare hands, letting the microbes do their work (with my assistance), and a couple of weeks later, holding in my two hands some of this "brown gold" and inhaling deeply the heavy, exotic perfume emanating from it.
Finished compost is marvelous stuff. Used either as a top dressing, or directly incorporated into the soil itself, compost is nearly miraculous in its ability to jump-start vigor and health in growing things. It is like the colostrum of the plant world. Compost improves and builds the structure of the soil so it can breathe oxygen from the air and drink in water from the rains. It provides an optimum chemical environment for releasing the compounds and elements that are vital for the survival and proliferation of plants.
I stand constantly astonished and perplexed by these transformative processes at work.
(for Part 3 of this series, READ here: ) (if you missed the beginning of this series, START here)
I stand constantly astonished and perplexed by these transformative processes at work.
(for Part 3 of this series, READ here: ) (if you missed the beginning of this series, START here)
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>>> Unless otherwise attributed, all text and images are Copyright, Bill Brockmeier, 2015. All rights reserved.
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